We Need to Protect Our Kids

We Need to Protect Our Kids

Over the past few weeks we have heard a great deal about the Penn St. sex scandal. Now there are reports about sexual abuse at Syracuse University. A few years ago there were reports of priests molesting little boys coming out on what seemed to be a weekly basis but it seems as if over time people stopped talking about it. I am afraid that after a few weeks we are going to forget about these cases and it bothers me. This subject needs to be addressed and it needs to be addressed in a major way!

Everyday little boys and little girls are being molested by people that they know, love, and trust. Usually when television show kids being molested, they show foster kids and kids that are wards of the state. People really aren't talking about the abuse that happens in regular homes. It's sad but kids are being raped by their own fathers, uncles, cousins, and brothers. What makes the situation worse is that because people don't talk about this, that we think these cases are isolated but they aren't. More of us know people who have been sexually abused than we think we know. Unfortunately, it's that shameful secret that many people keep to themselves and so they suffer in silence.

One of my classmates at Florida State University (Laveranues Coles), was molested by his stepfather when he was a kid. It took him until he was about 27 years old to talk about the situation because let's face it, men don't want to talk about being sexually molested by another man. The problem with this is that it allows anger to boil inside of us. It diminishes our ability to trust and can ruin many of our future relationships. I personally know at least three men who have been sexually molested as boys by people living in their own homes.

Before Oprah's show went off air, she had two girls on there who had been sexually molested by their brothers. When they told their mother, she did nothing. When they told the father, he started to molest them himself and again the mother did nothing. These little girls suffered for years and had they not told a neighbor about the situation, they would have suffered even longer. How sad and how sick is this story?! Your home is supposed to be your safe place and your family members are supposed to be your protectors, but for them and countless others, this was not the case.

I can't tell you how much it angers me to know that people are so willing to do nothing in these cases. I know of kids who have been molested and the parent or other relatives were never punished. There is one thing for a parent not to know what has happened to their child but it is another thing all together when a parent knows and chooses to keep quiet. To me that parent needs to be punished in the same manner as the person who has committed the assault. When you can't speak up to your protectors for help, who can you turn to? Then people want to know why their children resent them and have no respect for them.

Quite frankly, everyone involved in this Penn St. crap should be fired and criminal charges should be filed against them. To let something like that go because you don't want to bring scandal to the program is shameful. Our children deserve better than this and because they can't protect themselves, we need to protect them. If this happened to my child, nothing short of God would come between me and the beast who had caused this pain. I just think that more needs to be said and more needs to be done to protect our babies. If not people will continue to get away with these heinous crimes! In time all children lose their innocence, but this definitely is the wrong way to lose it!